Summary of a Literary Non-Fiction Text

Non-Fiction”How It Feels to Be Colored Me”

Due on Jan.25th before Friday

Read syllabus first

Read the non-fiction text carefully

NO Plagiarism!

How It Feels to Be Colored Me

I AM COLORED but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating
circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United
States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.

I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year
I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville l Florida. It is exclusively a
colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town
going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses l
the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles.
The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when
they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were
peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more
venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got
just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the
village.

The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town l but it
was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gate?post.
Proscenium box for a born first?nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show l but
I didn’t mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in
passing. I’d wave at them and when they returned my salute l I would say
something like this: “Howdy?do?well?I?thank?you?where?yougoin’?”
Usually automobile or the horse paused at this l and after a queer
exchange of compliments l I would probably “go a piece of the way” with
them l as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come
to the front in time to see mel of course negotiations would be rudely
broken off. But even SOl it is clear that I was the first “welcome?to?
ourstate” Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will
please take notice.

During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that
they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me I I
speak pieces” and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse?me?la, and
gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which
seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed
bribing to stop, only they didn’t know it. The colored people gave no
dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their lora
nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotelsl to the county?
everybody’s lora.

But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to
school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a lora.
When I disembarked from the river?boat at Jacksonville, she was no

more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of
Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in
certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast
brownwarranted not to rub nor run.

BUT I AM NOT tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in
my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not be long
to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has
given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it.
Even in the helter?skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seer that the
world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No,
I do not weep at the world??! am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand
daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty
years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing
well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a
potential slave said “On the line! ” The Reconstruction said “Get set! ” and
the generation before said “Go! ” I am off to a flying start and I must not
halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for
civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and
worthi.all that 1 have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth
ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to
be lost. It is thrilling to think?to know that for any act of mine, I shall get
twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold
the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether
to laugh or to weep.

The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown
specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost
thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is
never so exciting as the game of getting.

I do not always feel colored. Even now? I often achieve the unconscious
Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown
against a sharp white background.

For instance at Barnard. “Beside the waters of the Hudson” I feel my race.
Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and
overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the
waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

SOMETlfVlES IT IS the other way around. A white person is set down in our
midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in
the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person,
my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have
in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that
jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in
circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax

and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra
grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with
primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle
beyond. I follow those heathen?follow them exultingly. I dance wildly
inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head,
I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the
jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted
blue, My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter
something?give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece
ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I
creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and
find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

“Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his
fingertips.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him.
He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly
across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so
pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

AT CERTAIN TIMES I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a
certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as
snooty as the lions in front of the Forty?Second Street Library, for
instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on
the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees
knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The
cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal
feminine with its string of beads.

I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I
am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the
boundaries. My country, right or wrong.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry.
It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of
my company? It’s beyond me.

But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a
wall. Against a wall In company with other bags, white, red and yellow.
Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small, things
priceless and worthless. A first?water diamond, an empty spool bits of
broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away,
a rusty knife?blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never
will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a
dried flower or two still a little fragrant. in your hand is the brown bag. On
the ground before you is the jumble it held?so much like the jumble in the
bags could they be emptied that all might be dumped in a single heap and
the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of

colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the
Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place?who knows?

Mules and Men: Ways of Seeing

Introduction I AnthropologV i Autobiography I Performance I Other Frame~
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Summary of a Literary Non-Fiction Text 500 words

A succinct summary can help students explain key concepts or theories while formulating their arguments in a formal essay. While summaries can be extremely helpful in formal essay writing, one of the challenges to creating a summary is to know how much material to omit before the central idea has been lost. In this assignment students are asked to summarize one of the literary non-fiction texts from this course: “How it Feels to be Coloured Me.”

Format

All written assignments must be submitted in MLA (Modern Language Association) format, double spaced, with 1” margins, and in 12-point Times New Roman font. Please include your name, professor’s name, the course code, and date in the upper left corner. In the upper right corner please place your last name and a page number. Also, please do not include a cover page with any written assignments.